Thirty five years ago, six Irishmen were jailed for crimes they did not commit, and
spent 16 years in jail before their convictions were quashed.

As blows rained down on Johnny Walker’s stomach during a brutal beating
at the hands of the police, he realised that in saying almost nothing,
he had still said too much. “They were beating me up and my shirt came
open and I told them I had stomach ulcers, so all the punches went down
there... I should have shut my big mouth,” he says, his voice quavering.

Even now - 35 years after he was wrongly convicted of the Birmingham pub
bombings - the trauma he endured has left raw mental scars to go with
the physical marks left by torture and beatings at the hands of the
police and prison officers. “I still got parts of my body that is not
right... they knocked all my teeth out... I’ll carry these scars to my
grave.”

Walker was one of six men - with Richard McIlkenny, Paddy Hill, Hugh
Callaghan, Billy Power and Gerry Hunter - wrongly jailed for killing 21
people and injuring 182 others 35 years ago on 21 November 1974. Once
the police and prison guards got their hands on him, they inflicted
violent vengeance before the courts could even begin to consider
justice.

He shakes at the memory of what happened to him: “I’m paying the price
now [for] what they done to me...” According to the doctor who visited
him all those years ago, his body was covered in cuts and bruises. But
physical trauma paled compared to the mental assault. In a statement
made to his solicitors at the time, he told of becoming “completely
deranged” as a result of the repeated beatings and psychological torture
of mock executions, where he was made to believe he would be shot in the
head.

Then he spent more than 16 years in prison in what was later described
as one of “the greatest disasters to have shaken British justice in my
time” by the late Lord Devlin, a former law lord and Lord Justice of the
Court of Appeal. It cost Walker his wife, children, home, health, almost
his sanity.

Speaking at his home in a remote corner of Donegal, where the
74-year-old lives with his second wife, Paivi, 50, and son Martti, 15,
he said: “I can remember it all from yesterday. I can tell you, from the
day it happened, what happened that day, to the day I die. It’s planted
in your mind - you never forget that.”

He added: “I’m standing here shaking like a leaf, so I am, oh aye,
yes... it brings it all back. That’s why I try and keep it out. I don’t
like talking about it too much, it all comes back to you... “ He slumps,
bowed under the weight of every one of his 74 years. “... just like
yesterday.”

When, finally, he was freed, he withdrew from mankind and stayed
withdrawn. He lives a quiet life in a tiny village on the north-west
coast of Ireland. “I don’t trust anybody any more. It’s a sad thing to
say. When you meet people for the first time, you’re always a wee bit
wary about them.”

The inside of his immaculate three-bed house - down the end of a dirt
track overlooking the sea - gives no clue to his past. The nearest
neighbour is a couple of minutes’ walk away. It is an isolated but
beautiful setting, underpinned by calm and routine. Every morning, he
takes his labrador cross, Mukka, for a walk along the beach before
returning to his home.

But its walls and the idyllic surroundings are not enough to keep out
savage, marauding memories. Terrifying flashbacks come regularly. He
doesn’t want to give details: “You go to bed, you have these dreams. You
wake up and you’re covered in sweat.”

Recalling this prompts bitterness at what was done to him and the insult
added to injury when not a single police or prison officer was punished.

He has spent years escaping the notoriety of being one of the Birmingham
Six. The only other member of the six he keeps in touch with is Gerry
Hunter, and it has been 18 years since he last gave an interview to a
national newspaper. “I haven’t spoken to anybody for years. This is my
last interview... as we say, enough is enough. I’ve got to get on with
life. I’m getting old now.

“I just want to walk into the pub, just be an individual. Go and have a
drink with me friends and not people pointing you out and talking about
you... I mean I think it would have stopped after all these years, but
it’s still there.”

He was 39 and married with seven children when he was arrested on his
way to the funeral of an IRA member, James McDade, on the night of the
bombings. That the six were Irish and also knew McDade seemed to be all
the evidence the police and courts needed. They were convicted in 1975
and sentenced to life.

By the time he finally got out, his family were strangers to him: he was
divorced from his wife, Theresa, less than a year after being freed. “It
was sad; two strangers living under the same roof.” He lost contact with
most of his children - the worst thing of all, he says. His youngest
daughter, Joanna, was two when he went to jail. He emerged to find her a
grown woman: “I had seven children, but I didn’t know them.”

It was hard to adjust: “You would sit in a conversation where
everybody’s laughing and joking, and you wouldn’t know what they were
talking about... you’re not involved in it, you’re not a part of the
family.”

He spent a year and a half drinking: at one point getting through two
bottles of vodka a day. “If I was drunk, the whole world passed me by. I
couldn’t handle life as I wasn’t part of that life.” Things began
spiralling out of control. He told his sister he needed help. “They
brought me down here to Donegal, in a wee house by the beach, kept me
out of the pubs. Then, after six months, I met this second lady of mine,
my wife now. She come over from Finland and looked after me.” That was
16 years ago.

These days “it all depends how you wake up in the morning... I’m like an
Aborigine, I go walkabout for a couple of days in a world of my own
sometimes... I’m not the nicest person sometimes to live with, but
that’s not my fault; I can’t help it.

“Even now, talking about it, I do get a wee bit wired up... but I have
got to bring it out now and again to get it out of my system.

“We’re getting older now and we’re getting sentimental. We look back at
life and what we’ve lost... It’s hard enough to be locked away when
you’ve done something... but if you’ve done nothing it’s very, very
hard.”

The case is an indelible black mark on the British judicial system:
confessions obtained by systematic beatings; statements doctored. The
convictions were finally quashed on appeal in 1991, but they had to wait
another decade before getting compensation. Incredibly, money was
deducted for their stay in prison.

No one has been brought to justice for the bombings and case will not be
reopened “in a million years”, he says: “There’s too much scandal. All I
can say is that we never done it, the police know who done it - they
knew from day one who done it, and still they put me in prison.”

He admits “hatred” for the British authorities: “Everybody’s a terrorist
as far as they’re concerned now,” he adds, referring to the shooting of
Jean Charles de Menezes. “If you’re a coloured chap and you’re on a
train and you’re carrying a bag, it’s ‘oh, like watch him, he’s a
terrorist’... it’s awful.

“They all said what happened to us would never happen again... but the
Pakistanis, the Indians, these different nationalities, they’re getting
the backlash now. I don’t think there’s been much change, to be honest.”

The very notion of an apology from the Government fires him up further:
“There’s no chance the British government is going to apologise to six
Irish men, no chance! The justice we got was: after 16 and a half years
they let us out of prison. They thought they were doing us a good turn.
I don’t want their apology. I know I was right and they were wrong...
that does me. We’ve got to bury the hatchet one day, and I think it is
buried after tonight.”

His voice is quiet: “What happened to us should never happen again. We
pray it never happens to anybody.”

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